


the world begins to saturate

by impossibletruths



Series: here's how quentin coldwater can still win [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Bodyswap, Canonical Character Death, Dreams and Nightmares, Fix-It, Friendship, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Mentions Of Past Alice/Quentin, Resurrection, Sort Of, Soul Bond, The Author Has Taken A Loose Approach To Canon, True Love, he gets better though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 03:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20075476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/impossibletruths/pseuds/impossibletruths
Summary: Eliot is dreaming of the dark, the hungry, cold, empty dark. It's kinder than the memory, the grief, the what-ifs. Nothingness feels an awful lot like peace.Eliot, as it turns out, is dreaming of Quentin.-aka a bodyswap-esque au where eliot dreams of quentin in limbo and then the gang rescues him cause fuck it that’s why





	the world begins to saturate

**Author's Note:**

> This was started 50% for the whitespiresarmory "bodyswap" theme (which I very much missed the deadline for whoops) and 50% cause, like, fuck it canon is dead and I can pick whatever fix-it explanation I want. Title comes from [coldwaughtered](https://coldwaughtered.tumblr.com/post/186684519981/you-dream-of-the-day-you-wake-up-and-you-see-the). Unbeta'd so mistakes are my own, etc.

After the Monster, he dreams he’s underwater.

He’s pretty sure it’s underwater, anyway, in the way dream-things are what they are even when they aren’t. Everything is heavy and black and slow, like he’s at the bottom of the ocean, pressure pinning him in place. There’s nothing to see, to feel, to hear, nothing but suffocating darkness. The first time he dreams it he wakes himself in a blind panic, heaves in deep breaths until he chokes and Margo has to count them out for him, all sevens and tens.

Now, though, if he remembers not to think about it—which is like that stupid game, _ don’t think about elephants,_ but he’s better at it these days, holding two contrasting things in his head at once, the delicate balancing act of belief—he can linger. There’s something familiar to the dreams, a sense deep in his chest that if he just stays long enough, he will find whatever he is looking for.

He stays.

Eliot’s had his share of recurring dreams over the years. The brightest and bloodiest revolved around Mike, weeks and weeks of nightmares the drugs couldn’t wipe out, only twist into newer, more horrifying shapes. He had a terrible string of them about Teddy, young and lost and calling for him, and Eliot would search and search and never find him. He had them after too, like a reflex, which was as unfair as it was a relief, that he still had those ricepaper memories, that fifty years happened and mattered. He has them of Quentin still, frozen in the last moment he saw him, eyes wide and face tilted up and asking with a hope so bright it burns him away to ash, _ Eliot? _

Those dreams are always the worst. Those dreams he wakes up and he can’t breathe, no matter how hard he tries, grief heavy as stone.

These dreams, though, _ this _ dream—

It isn’t a nightmare exactly, for all that it has the trappings of one, for all that it wakes him the first, second, fifth time in a haze of directionless panic. For all that it feels like being drowned. Not the drowning, nothing so violent as that, but the part that comes afterwards, when everything is still and distant, surface of the world glittering far above, untouchable. Unable to touch you.

Eliot has drowned himself often enough—in alcohol, drugs, sex, magic—to know the feeling.

There’s something kind about the dream where he’s underwater, maybe, he thinks. He learns to find kind, anyway, to find it comforting. Nothing touches him here, not grief or pain or memory. There’s only the stillness and the dark and the distance, a cocoon of _ nothingnothingnothing _ folded around him until he forgets what it is to do anything except exist. It’s not peace, exactly; it’s too empty for peace, too dark and still.

But it’s pretty fucking close. Closer than anything he’s had in a long time. Sometimes he wishes he might never wake up.

He always does. That’s the nature of dreams. You always, always have to wake up.

* * *

“You’ve been sleeping a lot,” Margo says when it has been two weeks since the Monster and his body has begun to remember some of the things it’s supposed to do, like hold his own weight and bend at the joints. The stitches have come out of his stomach, which feels like a milestone, but the wound isn’t quite closed yet and consequently he has to be doubly delicate with all things. 

Eliot is not sleeping right now, though he sort of wishes he were, because the hollow dark is kinder than Margo’s piercing worry or the daily struggle of of putting his broken pieces back together and remembering how to live again. He closes his eyes and sinks further into the couch. The television hums in the background, volume turned low, tuned to something he hasn’t been watching, because it’s the sort of program Quentin would enjoy and he is—

Not thinking about that.

“I’m making up for lost time,” he says. “Pretty sure I didn’t sleep for a while there.” 

Which is an easy excuse, and cheap, and not altogether false. He has plenty of lost time to make up for, all the hours the Monster didn’t stop to rest, the weeks and months he wore Eliot’s body like a well-made coat, wore it threadbare. And if she’s right that he’s sleeping too much, if the dream leaves him twice as tired when he wakes as when he falls asleep, if not even the thrashing nightmares are as as bad as the strange-still-silent dark, well.

It’s better than the grief. Drowning himself is familiar; he knows these steps by heart.

“Just saying, El,” she pushes, because she’s Margo and always pushing, because she’ll fall apart if she stops. It’s like physics, maybe, somewhere in there; as long as the force propelling her forward remains stronger than that pushing her down she’ll keep on going and going and going.

Eliot admires that, he does. He’s just so fucking tired.

“I need a little more time,” he says, skirting the edges of terrible, heavy things like grief and memory and honesty, and she sighs so unhappily he has to look at her. The television screen flickers at the corner of his eye.

“Well, hurry up,” she tells him, only a little ruined by the way her expression splinters. He attempts a smile for her and manages something faint and fragile and almost real. What a sorry pair they make.

“Yes, Bambi,” he agrees, and she huffs and curls into his side. She’s gentle against his stomach and heavy against his shoulder, a perfect fit. She smells like hairspray and her favorite shampoo. She’d never smelled like that when he was trapped in his mind. Nothing had smelled of anything there. He’d like to feel some sort of relief that this is real, that he’s in his own skin living his own life again, but it’s hard to feel relief when life is this, all grief and empty space and cotton heavy exhaustion that saps color from the world and strength from his limbs, leaves him a hundred time hollower than he was when the Monster pulled his strings.

He closes his eyes again, sinks into the white noise of the television.

He dreams he’s underwater.

* * *

A month after the Monster—long enough that things have settled into some new semblance of normal, long enough that their friends of circumstance have found other circumstances to occupy them, long enough that Margo’s patience has worn to shreds and she has started having quiet, intense conversations that end abruptly when Eliot limps into the room, long enough that all of Quentin’s things have disappeared from the common spaces of apartment, and Eliot doesn’t know where they’ve gone and can’t decide if he wants to know—Lipson visits.

“Just a checkup,” she tells him when she appears at their door, and he would believe her except for the way her eyes keep darting to Margo where she stands near the wall with her arms folded, chin up, battle ready. Daring him to call her on it.

But an argument requires energy, and he’s too tired to argue. So he accepts her at her word, even though the stitches are out, the wound closed, the PT proceeding on schedule. Even though he doesn’t have an appointment scheduled for another two weeks and he takes his dozens of vitamins, antibiotics, draughts of magical something-or-other that is slowly repairing the nerve damage, the tendon damage, the organ damage, the hundred and one things left to go wrong when a child monster of godlike power decides to use you as his personal meat puppet. Protesting is too much of an effort. Easier to let it happen. When it’s over he can sleep again.

He heaves himself up from the couch and limps into the kitchen where Lipson lays out some of the tools of her trade: shards colored glass etched with spellwork, a thermometer that doesn’t take temperature, a porcelain bowl filled with something that looks not unlike a vegetable smoothie and smells absolutely awful. Making it all the way to one of the barstools is less of an ordeal these days, but _ less of an ordeal _ is still miles from _ easy _. His grip around the cane is white-knuckle.

The part of him that isn’t weighted down by this endless exhaustion understands Margo’s shortening temper and growing concern. The part of him that still remembers what it’s like to feel things fears what it means that he’s like this all the time, sleeping just to have enough energy to sleep again. Everything saps his strength in a way that scares him, or would scare him if he could think clearly enough about it to muster true fear.

Mostly, though, he would rather be sleeping. Cotton-soft forgetting calls to him like a siren song. It’s easier to dream.

“So, Eliot,” says Lipson as he sits, cane propped next to him. He gingerly stretches out one leg, knee popping in a way that ricochets up to his hip and down to his ankle. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” he lies.

Her expression suggests she doesn’t believe him in the slightest. She takes his pulse. “No lingering pain?”

“Some.” His knees, mostly. Wrists and fingers. The entire mess of his back, like he went from twenty-six to geriatric without a heartbeat in between. His chest aches sometimes, without sense or reason. It’s better now, though. He does his best to be grateful for that, that he can stand again, walk again. It’s hard.

It’s really, really fucking hard.

“And I hear you’ve been experiencing some lethargy.”

“Some.”

“Sometimes you have trouble even getting out of bed?” There it is again, the way her eyes slide to Margo standing just off to the side. A flare of irritation bubbles up, bright and sharp enough to pierce the haze of exhaustion.

“Not sure if you noticed, but my friend died—” His voice breaks around the word, and Lipson expression slips into pity. He hates her then, just for a moment. He carries on twice as vitriolic. “—_died,_ recently, so maybe that shouldn’t come as such a surprise. Or would you suggest self-medicating again, Professor?”

She flinches back, and he feels good about that for a moment before the fog rolls back in and he loses the satisfaction of the bite. He hunches forward.

“No, I— No, of course not.” She clears her throat a little and picks up something that looks not unlike a jeweler’s lens. “I’m just going to, ah, check a couple things.”

A couple things becomes a handful becomes a laundry list of tests and questions. Lipson goes around him with half a dozen different shards of glass, swapping them out intermittently. She smears the terrible smelling smoothie over the backs of his hands and examines them for a long minute. She has him stand with his arms out to the side and tuts around him for long enough that he feels the strain from his wrists all the way to his shoulder blades. She takes detailed measurements of his skull, compares them to a chart spread out on the counter. The longer she goes about it the more she mutters about it under her breath, expression screwing up into confusion.

“Well,” she says some half an hour later, while Eliot leans heavily on the cane and wonders if he will ever be free of this. She frowns at him.

“What’s the diagnosis, doc?” asks Margo from the far side of the room, watching hawkishly. Lipson’s frown deepens.

“It’s definitely some kind of magical exhaustion, but I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” She walks a slow circle around Eliot. “I’ve got one last thing I could try, I suppose, but I really don’t see it working.”

“Just do it,” mutters Eliot, itching to be done. She hesitates an extra beat.

“It might be a little uncomfortable.”

“Like this isn’t already,” he says, and she shrugs and snaps through a bright, quick tut, and the room goes dim for a moment, then sun bright, and something in his chest _ flares _ in a way that makes him feel like he’s breaking, like she’s reached in and pulled something so hard that the whole of his rib cage is snapping open, and he is—

Underwater.

He recognizes it instantly, the stillness, the quiet, the dark. It’s clearer now that it has ever been, and maybe that’s paradoxical, clear darkness, but there’s a sharpness, like someone has removed a film from his eyes, like he’s awake after a very long, very deep sleep.

It’s not underwater. It’s— something else. Something _ empty_.

His awareness fractures. He’s still in the kitchen; he can feel the smooth head of his cane under his hands, hear Lipson’s voice fuzzy and distorted. But he’s in the dream too, standing in— yes, water, a shallow puddle soaking into the soles of his shoes even though he’s in the kitchen in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan. It takes him a moment to regain his bearings, to balance two sets of input at once. It’s the feeling of being on the cusp of a spell and not letting it loose; something builds under his skin, iron-hot in his chest, but he can’t let it go.

The dream starts to move; in the kitchen he rocks on his heels as his head turns in the darkness, searching, and his mouth opens, and in the kitchen he’s saying, “What the fuck,” his voice loud and distant at the same time, and here in the dream he’s saying—

“Hello?”

—in a voice that isn’t his own, in a voice that belongs to—

“Is someone—”

Quentin.

“—there?”

He breathes, “Q?”

The cane falls from his numb fingers, gunshot loud, and he’s stumbling forward, both parts of him, holding on as best as he can as to make it one, two, three steps before his knees give out, and Lipson is saying something and Margo is shouting and he’s falling towards—

* * *

He wakes to darkness, and a sharp pain in his chest, and the feeling that someone has taken a pickaxe to the inside of his skull.

“Whoa,” says someone to his left. “Careful.”

He recognizes the voice. Julia. It’s not dark. His eyes are closed.

He cracks one then the other, blinking back to consciousness. He’s in the living room, laid out on the couch like an invalid which, well, if the shoe fits. The room is all purple and blue, and if he tilts his head he can just make out a slice of night sky through the window. There’s something itchy against his forehead, and Julia Wicker crouches next to him, dark eyes shining in the light that spills out from the kitchen where quiet voices twine together.

“Uh,” he says. Last he heard, Julia was traveling, and sometimes Traveling, and very much MIA. “Why are you here?”

His body feels leaden, almost, a hundred time heavier than it should. He tries to bring one hand towards his forehead, to probe at whatever’s itching there, and finds lifting it a monumentous effort. Julia grabs his hand before he can get halfway up.

“No, don’t touch it.”

“Touch what?”

“You hit your head.”

“Oh.”

Right, yes. He fell. He fell, because he was— because he’d heard—

“Oh, _ fuck _.”

Weight be damned; he jolts up so fast he’s nauseous. His hand tightens around the top of the couch and he wills his stomach to settle. Julia sits back on her heels, staring up at him with naked concern.

He says, voice distant to his own ears, “I heard Q.”

He looks at her, uncertain. Hadn’t he? He would stake his life on it, but that isn’t worth all that much these days. Julia stares back at him. He expects her pity. Or sympathy, really; of all of them, Julia best understands how horrible and hateful the pity feels. How sympathy is kinder.

There’s no pity across her face. No sympathy either, for that matter. Not even shock. She nods a little, and his whole world rocks with it.

“Yeah. Yeah, we think maybe you did.”

“I—” That throws him. The sharp pain in his chest redoubles, a strange burn tucked away just behind his heart. He rubs at it absentmindedly. “How?”

“We don’t... quite know, yet. They’re looking into it. Margo, um, called us back.”

Eliot frowns at her. “Who’s ‘us?’”

“Everyone?” Julia shrugs a little, head tilting one way then the other. “Well, Penny’s in Fillory hunting down Josh, but. The rest of us. The questers.” She says it with a narrow little smile, like they’re on the same team again, like they’re back in the game.

Which they— are? Must be. Eliot’s not so dead to the world that he’s missed how they’ve all been waiting for the faintest glimmer of hope, foolish and impossible and desperate. And here it is, wrapped up in a not-quite nightmare, so it’s all hands on deck because this is what they do: strive for the impossible one reckless step at a time.

Eliot can’t process it. It’s too much after months of empty grey; he doesn’t know where to start. He sits awkwardly on the couch, arm over the side and knees folded, hand rubbing at his chest. Julia stares at him like she’s waiting for him to say something, but there’s nothing to say.

He just— It’s Quentin. What else is there?

Margo appears from the kitchen, and Eliot watches a great weight lift off her shoulders when she sees him sitting up.

“Finally,” she huffs, and he knows he’s scared her, and he feels— sorry about it, sorry in a way he hasn’t felt in weeks, gross and ashamed and wonderfully rich, real. She stalks over to him, arms folded. “The fuck were you thinking?”

“I’m sure I deserve this,” he says, because he probably does, “but about what, exactly?”

“You’ve been getting visions of Quentin for _ weeks _ and you didn’t want to say anything about it?”

He stares at her and tries to put a response together, he really does. There’s just not enough there to grab onto. He doesn’t have an answer for her, not even the beginnings of one.

He hadn’t known.

She scowls at him a moment longer, then lets it go, arms unfolding, expression softening. She sits on the couch next to him. “You didn’t know.”

“If I had do you think I’d be...” He gestures at himself, shirt too large from the weight he’s lost and hair too long and the dusting of stubble that’s become the beginnings of a beard because he hasn’t had the energy to take care of it properly, because he’s been holed up in the apartment halfway between grief and giving up and so fucking _ tired _ all the time, unnaturally tired, tired and dreaming of— of Quentin, apparently.

He looks from Margo back to Julia, who pushes herself up enough to join them on the couch. He swings his legs to the side to make room for her. He says, absolutely honest, “I have no idea what the fuck is going on.”

"Lucky for you,” Margo says with a grin like the blade of a knife, glinting and dangerous, “we’ve just figured out a whole lot of shit. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Thank you?”

She stares at him a beat too long, then nods in a self satisfied sort of way, and launches into a spiralling explanation of things he only half understands between the shock and the exhaustion and the truly unbearable headache. He gets the gist, though. The important part: that Quentin isn’t dead. Quite.

“Only mostly dead?” Julia asks across Eliot, because she’s exactly the same kind of nerd Q is, down to the dumb references and bad timing. His heart does something funny in his chest. Margo rolls her eyes.

“Yeah, sure. He’s somehow—” She directs a look to Eliot, as if it’s his fault he didn’t know, didn’t say anything— “latched on to El’s life energy or whatever, which is why you’ve been Sleeping Beauty for the past month.”

“Huh.” She’d been right to call Lipson. She knows it; he can tell by the curl of her mouth and the tilt of her brow. She knows it, and now he knows it, and she knows he knows, so. That’s that done. He swallows, dry and difficult around the lump in his throat. “So what do we do now?”

“What do you think? We drag his sorry ass back here.”

“How?”

“Best we can figure it?” Margo shrugs. “We’re gonna Orpheus and Eurydice the shit outta this.”

“Right,” says Eliot. It sits for a moment. Then— “But, like, _ how_?”

Margo looks to him, to Julia, to him again. Over her shoulder to the others in the kitchen.

“Yeah,” she sighs. “Fuck if I know.”

“It’s something,” Julia murmurs, and Eliot nods around a sudden lump in his throat. They’ve done more with less.

“We’ll get him back,” Margo says, like there’s no other option. Which— well. There isn’t.

* * *

Penny arrives with Josh in tow not long after Eliot comes to, Alice and Kady emerging from the kitchen to greet them. Eliot weathers the rapidfire reunion with as much patience as he can muster. The urge to act prickles under his skin, clawing up his throat and down his spine and insisting every minute they aren’t chasing after Quentin is a moment wasted. Adrenaline kicks through him, directionless and exhausting. His hands shake. All of him aches. He wants to get up, to move, to _ do something_, and he’s too tired for it, battered and still broken and useless.

And yet.

Among all the terrible, ruinous things his body has done these past few months it’s managed to become a lifeline. It feels like a terrible joke, a disaster waiting to happen. Who thought it was a good idea to tuck the frail remains of Quentin’s life away in Eliot’s chest for him to care for? As if he’s done anything but break every good and true thing he’s had.

And further still, beneath the anxiety and the terror, hums something that feels an awful lot like hope. Like somehow, some way, they can still fix this. 

He can’t think about it too hard. If he does he’s going to fall apart, and he can’t do that, not when Q so desperately needs him whole. 

The conversation churns on around him, awkwardness smoothing away as they find their way back to familiar territory, the push-pull of mockery and irritation and honest friendship. There’s only so many times you can fight the world together before the roughness begins to feel like a comfort. None of them have ever been particularly good about pulling their punches, but that counts for a lot when you’re standing back to back against a common enemy. Or striving towards a common goal.

“You still with us, El?” Margo asks as Josh finishes up reenacting Penny’s arrival in the middle of whatever disaster Fillory is experiencing now. Eyes slide to him, and then away again. Do they all know? Probably. They’re all here.

He hums an affirmation, but his face must betray a different story because Margo chivvies everyone up out of the living room and to the kitchen. He tries to be less grateful for that. He’s happy to see them, he is, but it’s too many people after so long drifting, and his head hurts like a bitch. He’s in no fit state for company.

So in spite of the welling nervous energy he finds himself nodding off again. The tangle of their voices around the kitchen lulls him to an uneasy sleep.

He dreams a trembling nightmare of Quentin drowning in an inky dark, streaked with it like fracture lines of shattered glass, and Eliot reaches and reaches and reaches for him, and when finally he manages to grab his icy hand he drowns too, dragged headfirst into—

It’s the dream again. Peaceful darkness swallows him whole.

For a moment he sinks into the calm of it, the absence of everything. The nightmare slips away, and in its place he’s left with the steady nothing. He wants to let go.

He can’t. Somewhere, maybe, is Quentin.

He peers uselessly into a blackness so thick can’t see his hand in front of his face and turns a slow, shuffling circle. If he listens he can hear the muted splashing of water underfoot. Everything comes from a great distance away; he’s cotton wrapped and straining for clarity.

“Hello?” he calls. His voice comes distorted, and something burns in his chest, right behind his heart. He rubs a hand at it, scraping his hand against the zipper of the— hoodie he’s wearing?

The burning in his chest redoubles as he brings both hands up, feels soft cotton, his smooth face, the lock of hair hanging in his eyes. Straight hair, a little thin, a little greasy, like it hasn’t been washed recently, and he knows that hair, knows the shape of the face under his fingers, and it isn’t _ his _ face it’s—

He wakes himself in a panic and stumbles into the kitchen where only Penny and Kady and Julia are still awake, tucked together and talking in quiet voices. Julia looks up at him.

“Eliot?”

“I’m not dreaming about Q,” he tells her, trying to suck in a breath. His chest_ burns_. “I’m dreaming I _ am _ Q.”

Alone and in the dark, halfway to forgetting and content to let it happen. The thought of it churns in his stomach; he’s sick in the sink, sour and thin. Penny mutters something behind him, and a hand rubs across his back. It’s Kady, expression unusually concerned. He looks at her, then past her to Julia, her grip white-knuckle on the counter as Penny sets a hand at her elbow, and—

“We have to fix this.” His eyes fix on Julia, who understands, who loves Quentin as much as he does, who would go just as far as he would if not farther. “We have to get him out of there.”

Julia nods, face white. It’s Kady who answers him.

“We will,” she promises, looking between them, between all of them. “We’ll figure it out. Whatever it takes.”

* * *

It’s Alice, a week and a half later, who puts it together.

She gathers them midway through the morning, sun slanting through the balcony windows and lighting the apartment in a way that reminds him of Fillory, airy and bright. They sit around the couches while she paces a short, sharp divot in the living room rug, hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

“Spit it out,” Margo tells her, first to lose patience, and Alice stops so quickly her hair fans out around her face.

“I don’t know how or why,” she leads with, which isn’t a promising start, “but it’s an animus binding.”

Eliot... doesn’t know what that is.

From the look of everyone else, they don’t either.

Then Julia’s eyes go wide—always quick on the uptake, Wicker; she’d have done well at Brakebills, probably _ did _ well at Brakebills thirty-nine lifetimes in a row—and she says, a little breathless, “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know.” Alice looks frustrated by that, a problem she can’t solve, like the failings of rationality are a personal affront. “It’s archaic, and—no offense Eliot—there’s no way they’d know about it. I just— It doesn’t make any sense.”

Eliot is far too confused to be offended. “Back up a moment,” he says, sharing a look with Margo. “What the hell’s an anim— whatever you just said.”

“An animus binding,” Julia repeats. “It’s a soul bond, essentially. A, uh, spiritual entanglement.”

Eliot stares at her. “Is that a euphemism?”

“No.”

“A _ soul _ bond?” Penny sounds as incredulous as Eliot feels. “What, like, Harry Potter type shit?”

“Oh man,” says Josh. “Eliot’s a horcrux.”

Eliot’s lightheaded is what he is. He folds his hands in his lap to mask the trembling.

“Quit talking about made up magical bullshit and explain what that means,” Margo scowls. Alice folds her arms tight across her chest.

“It’s a bond between people’s… I don’t know, souls. Spirits. Essences, whatever you want to call it. It’s old and unbreakable magic.” Josh opens his mouth and Alice cuts him off before he can get anywhere. “_Yes _ like a horcrux, fine. There are records of bindings going back hundreds of years, but there’s never been an exact explanation for how to create one. It’s not a, a spell. It’s something else.”

“Something else?” Margo’s eyebrow tilts. “That’s all you got?”

Alice hesitates. “It’s mostly theoretical.”

“I’m sensing a _ but _ in here,” Josh says. Alice scowls.

“_ But _ there are more mundane variations.”

“Like what?” Eliot says flatly. Alice takes up pacing again, hands tight at her sides.

“Like magical contracts. Marriage vows, but that went out of vogue decades ago. Fidelity clauses.”

Julia snorts. “No wonder they went out of fashion.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense,” Alice grouses. “I mean, nothing personal Eliot but neither you nor Quentin has the knowledge to attempt anything like that, and even if you did it’s not like there’s a…”

“Instruction manual?” Eliot offers dryly, and the furrow between her brows eases slightly.

“Yeah.” She sighs. “You can’t forge one accidentally.”

“Sounds kind of like you can,” Eliot mutters. Alice’s expression goes funny, like she wants to stay something but doesn’t want it said. Eliot sinks back into the couch. His chest burns where Quentin’s soul is tangled up in his, and nobody can even say _ why_. 

Their lives are so massively fucked.

“And one of the things this binding does is, what, keep someone from dying?” Kady asks, bitterness coiling through her voice. Alice unwinds a little more.

“It— No. Not that I know.”

Margo says, “So what gives?”

“So, um,” says Penny. He winces a little as the group’s attention swings to him. “About that. I have a thought.”

Eliot folds his hands together. His stomach flips over, caught between hope and fear so strong he feels ill. Penny sits forwards on the couch.

“Coldwater, when he— I mean, we were right by the Seam, right?” That’s mostly directed at Alice, whose chin jerks up and down like a marionette on strings. “And things went a little, uh.”

“He exploded.” Alice is brittle, like she’ll snap at even the slightest touch. Eliot folds his hands tighter around each other, trying not to think, not to imagine. Like he could stick his fingers in his ears and not have to face the details he’s been trying so hard to avoid, because every little bit of fresh information is something he can twist into a newer, more horrible what-if.

“Yeah, right, but.” Even Penny sounds subdued. “What if he, I don’t know, didn’t make it all the way.”

“All the way to— being dead?” Margo asks, voice thick with incredulity. Penny shrugs.

“I mean, y’know. We were in the mirror world. Shit’s fucked there. Maybe he’s, I don’t know, floating around in there, or stuck halfway, or—”

“Or in the Seam,” Julia says, and a crooked, heavy silence follows. Eliot thinks of nothingness, the forgetful dark, the sensation of peace and the endless space. Quentin is there, dead and not dead, and he has nothing but Eliot to hold on to.

He’s been there so long, Eliot thinks miserably, fear-hope-horror crawling under his skin. Weeks, months, and Eliot has been dreaming like it’s a comfort. He tightens his hands one around the other until he imagines he can feel the bones grate.

Julia’s hand enters his field of vision, settles over his. Coaxes him to let go. He flexes his fingers. His eyes, throat, chest all burn. He should say something. He doesn’t know what to say.

“Hey, um,” says Josh to the room at large. “Can we go back to the whole horcrux thing?”

“No,” Margo says, even though she looks sharply at Eliot, so there will no doubt be a conversation later. Maybe he should just have it all out now, but—

His chest aches. He rubs at it with one hand and watches everyone watch him.

Fuck. He wants a drink.

He bundles that in with the rest of the hope-want-need churning through in his mind and makes himself bury it, makes himself look up at Alice. Swallows. “The Library will have resources, right?”

“Yes.” She doesn’t look particularly happy about it. Her eyes slide briefly to Julia, who shrugs in agreement. “We can look into it.”

“It’s somewhere to start,” Julia says firmly, like they’ve made a decision when they haven’t really; or they have but the decision is _ save Q _ and that doesn’t come with an instruction manual. She turns to Eliot, gentle. “You should probably get some rest.”

He nearly snorts. As if he’ll be able to sleep now. But he appreciates the out.

“Okay,” he agrees, levering himself to his feet as the meeting begins to break up, everyone splintering off into ones and twos, and he firmly ignores Margo’s gaze as he and his cane make an unwieldy exit.

* * *

Margo gives him all of five minutes to himself before she slips into the bedroom behind him.

“If you think for a second you’re gonna just walk away from this—”

“I don’t.” He sits at the edge of the bed, elbows braced on his knees, and doesn’t look up at her as the door clicks shut and her heels tap across the floor. He’s got a headache and his chest is on fire and he’s nauseous with the scale of what this means, and he can’t even begin to think of sleep with everything that’s rattling around his head.

He stifles a hysterical giggle, or maybe a sob. When did this become his _ life_?

The bed dips as Margo drops down next to him.

“Soul magic?”

“Well, being possessed by an old god is so last season, you know.”

“El.”

“I know, I know.” He sighs, fingers flexing against nothing. He craves a cigarette, less for the kick of the nicotine and mostly because he wishes he had something to hold in his hands, something to mask the shaking.

“I know you,” she says quietly. The weight of her gaze is crushing, but he can’t quite bring himself to look at her. “And this isn’t the sort of shit you just stumble into. So what aren’t you telling me?”

The edge of his smile curls into something sharp and bitter.

And it’s not like he knows for sure, not like he can point and say _ this is it. _ But if he had to choose, if he had to make his best guess, well. Maybe he’s not quite completely clueless about why him, of everyone. It’s just easier not to think about it. Amid the grey and the haze and the empty dreams he’s almost been able to let it go. 

He runs his hands over his knees, watches the ripples of the fabric smooth away under his touch. Margo waits for him to settle himself, but he’s as settled as he’ll ever be.

“You know we spent a lifetime together.”

He can’t see her face but he knows she’s frowning. “In Fillory, yeah. I got the note. Sucks hearing your best friend died and you weren’t even there for it.”

That— stings, yeah, and isn’t it messed up that that’s the sort of life experience they share these days? But that’s not the point, the point is—

“No, I mean. Together together. Wife, kid, little house in the big Fillorian woods. Horribly domestic, you’d have hated it.” He hesitates. “It was good, Margo. It was really good.”

Margo’s quiet for a long, long minute. Long enough that he looks up, finds her staring at him.

“You never said,” she says finally. Eliot snorts, humorless and bitter. Shame bubbles up and for a moment he’s there again, back in the throne room, _ not me _ and _ not you _ and _ not when we have a choice. _ The look on Quentin’s face. The acceptance. How much Eliot hated himself in that moment. How much he still hates himself.

If they save him, at least Eliot will be able to apologize. How fucked up is that, that Quentin is half dead and all Eliot can think is, _ maybe I can fix this_.

“It was another life,” he says, dismissive as he can muster, and it rings as hollow now as it did then. “We got back and it wasn’t— It didn’t matter.”

“Bullshit it didn’t matter.” Her expression closes tight with anger. Her voice could cut glass. “Bullshit. You didn’t see him, El, killing himself to get you back.”

“I know,” he says, tiny, because he does, he knows now. He knew then too but he’s _ looking _ now, taking out that old shame and examining it from each and every angle because despite everything, despite how completely Eliot shattered his heart, Quentin’s still put his life squarely in Eliot’s hands. And without knowing it, without realizing, Eliot’s accepted.

Margo pushes forward anyway, unwilling to stop, or just unable. Fury floods out of her, gathers in the air like a storm cloud, roiling and sparking and awful. “He gave up everything,” she says, damning. Eliot takes the blow. “He went around with that thing wearing your body every single day, did everything it asked him to do, _ every _ day. We thought leaving him in that prison would be bad but this—”

“I know.” The hurt in his chest isn’t magic or hope. It’s just heartbreak.

Margo’s voice breaks, and Eliot opens his arms to her. “I know,” he says again when she buries her face in his shoulder. She trembles, just a little.

“He gave up everything and no one helped.”

They did help. He knows they did, because Eliot’s here, now, isn’t he? He’s here, and there are burns across Margo’s wrists and Julia still jumps when she sees him moving out of the corner of her eye. He knows because Penny willingly dove into that thing’s mind and found him among the mess. He knows they helped.

Just. Not enough.

“I’m sorry,” he says. It’s the tip of an iceberg; he knows perfectly well how much apologizing he has left to do, how many mistakes he has to make up for. How many people he’s hurt. He knows how badly he fucked up. The least he can do is own it.

Eventually sits back a little, eyes red-rimmed but dry, refusing to cry. He tucks her hair behind one ear. That’s his Bambi.

“Damn right,” she says, and she hits him in the shoulder. It resonates all the way down to his aching chest and the knot of fire blazing behind his heart.

That’s Q, he tells himself. That’s Q holding on for all he’s worth, and somehow they’re going to save him like he’s saved them so many times, and Quentin will be here again, safe and whole. Eliot doesn’t need anything else. Not his forgiveness, not his understanding, not his— his love. Nothing so long as he comes back.

Fuck. He has to come back. 

Maybe she that reads on his face, or maybe it’s just because she’s Margo and she knows him inside and out, but she sits back a little, takes his face in her hands.

“Hey.”

Her eyes are liquid, vast and deep, and he imagines he could drown in them.

“We’re gonna get him back,” she tells him. “We’re all in. Whatever it takes.”

“Why me, Margo?” he asks quietly. “All I have ever done is fucked our shit up.”

“El,” she sighs. “Honey. You’ve been taking care of that boy since the minute you saw him.” One hand slides from his cheek down to his chest, heart beating steadily under her palm. “He’s still in there. Maybe a little more literally than we’d like, but shit’s weird like that. You’re not gonna fuck it up.”

He takes a shuddering breath and blows it out slowly. Tries for a smile. “Pretty sure Julia would kill me if I did.”

“She wouldn’t be the only one,” Margo tells him, and pats his face a little more sharply than necessary. “Get it together, El. We need you. Q needs you.”

And that’s the root of it all. Q needs him. He’ll be whatever he needs to be, for Q’s sake.

“Okay,” he says. Promises. Bravery, right? That’s what it all comes down to. Holding onto the things that terrify him, because they’re worth the fear. 

He swallows. “Okay. What’s next?”

* * *

What’s next is that Alice disappears into the Library, her personal project these days, and takes most of the gang with her: Penny for a lift, Kady whose pet project has been brokering peace between the Hedges and the Library, Margo for backup, Josh for–– Eliot isn’t sure. Moral support, maybe. Eliot settles himself in the living room with a cup of tea, which is about the most exciting thing his still-healing body can manage, and skims the internet for something useful. He doesn’t expect to find anything—that’s what the group at the Library is for—but it helps him stave off the feeling of being useless, and the warmth of the tea helps the ache in his chest a little.

“You there?” he asks quietly, hand pressed over his heart. _ Ba-dum _ says his heart. “I don’t know if you can hear me or if you’re seeing any of this, but… We’re going to get you out, Q. Just hang on, okay?”

The sharp-strange ache twinges in the shelter of his ribs. Eliot breathes around the lump in his throat and scrolls through dead end after dead end until he falls asleep, afternoon sunlight a blanket across his lap.

When he wakes, he has a horrible crick in his neck and Julia is sitting on the far side of the couch.

“Hi,” she says with a little wave when he stirs. “You have a moment?”

Eliot pushes himself upright, wincing as everything pops and stretches and protests all at once. The afterthought of a nightmare drifts at the edges of his mind, a dream of being pressed into the earth by an enormous stone on his chest, which hurts more now than it did when he fell asleep. He rubs at it, like he could reach into the cavity of his rib cage and find Quentin there, pull him through. Julia stares at him with steady, dark eyes, perched at the edge of the couch and infinitely patient. The sun has sunk lower in the sky, pulpy orange light staining the walls.

“While I am a very busy man,” he replies, gesturing at the empty apartment “I think I can spare some time.” Julia cracks a brief smile. “What can I do for you, Lady Julia?”

“Something happened when you were in Fillory,” she says. It’s not accusatory exactly, but clearly she expects an answer. Eliot pushes his hair out of his face and wishes he felt rested. Honestly, at this point, he would settle for awake.

“Which time?” he says, just to be a little difficult, and her mouth quirks.

“During the quest.” 

He’s tempted to be an ass about it a little longer, but Julia doesn’t deserve that.

“How much did Q tell you about getting the time key?” he hazards, and watches Julia’s expression go thoughtful.

“A little. That you went to Fillory in the past and solved the Mosaic. Grew up and— and died.” She hesitates. “He said he had a son.”

“Well it’s the CliffsNotes, but that pretty much covers it.” He tries for levity but it still aches, one more hurt to add to his list. He sighs. “Margo stopped us before we went. She knew where the key would be, because Q wrote to her before he died, and it never happened at all. But we remembered. No idea how.”

“Time magic,” says Julia with a delicate little snort. “Just keeps fucking us.”

“It really does.”

She’s quiet for a moment. Eliot’s knees ache. The sky through the window starts to purple.

“A lifetime in Fillory,” she says. “I bet he loved that.”

She says it mild, a little amused, a little sorry, and all at once Eliot’s eyes are prickling with tears that he refuses to cry, not when there’s still hope.

“Yeah,” he agrees, voice thick. “He did.” 

It’s like a dream, that lifetime in Fillory. He has snapshot snatches of memory: the way the sun shone through Ari’s hair one autumn afternoon, the chime of Teddy’s laughter, the rich smell of something cooking and the patter of rain outside. Quentin’s smile, again and again and again. He’s hard pressed to recall the details, but he _ feels _ it in his bones the same way he feels the evening light through the room, a bright haze of joy that colors the smokey impression of a life well lived and well loved.

“I’m going to fix this,” he tells her, and he means the being dead part, and he means the part he fucked up long before that, and he means whatever else needs fixing, really. He’ll set it right. “Whatever it takes.”

She looks a little like a goddess again, limned in golden light. “I know,” she says, like it’s that easy, and for a moment, with Julia glowing next to him— Shit. He believes it. The ache in his chest eases a little.

Her mouth twists up at the corners, a curling, conspiratorial grin. Eliot feels lighter than he has in a long time. He understands why Quentin loved her so much. “You might even get some help with that, Waugh.”

“Wonder of wonders,” he returns. Promise shivers through him, possibility shot through with determination. They’re magicians; they can reshape the world with nothing but possibility and determination. It’s a heady feeling. “Think you could, mm, help me up in the meantime?”

“I think that can be arranged.”

His back pops in a rolling cascade when she pulls him upright, so loud Julia laughs, and she helps him hobble into the kitchen where he braces himself up at the stove long enough to make an approximation of a meal, and they’re still sharing it when the other half of their strange group blinks into the living room.

“Shit that smells good,” says Penny immediately, following his nose. 

“Amazing what you can do with real vegetables, isn’t it?”

Penny gives him the finger with one hand and plucks a mushroom out of the pan. Kady drifts over to speak with Julia and Alice clears her throat and says, “Eliot, can I talk to you?”

She meets his gaze head on, almost a challenge, and his heart stutters.

“Of course,” he agrees as levelly as he can, and trails gingerly after her as she leads him into the bathroom.

“Sorry,” she mutters. “I didn’t think you’d want to take the stairs.”

“It’s appreciated,” he returns. Climbing the narrow spiraling stairs up to the second floor of the penthouse isn’t something he’s itching to try.

She shuts the door behind her. The bathroom is big, but not _ that _ big. He wedges himself awkwardly up onto the counter, legs dangling. Alice folds her arms and stands on the bath mat, staring him down.

The thing is, Eliot likes Alice. Maybe not the whole betraying them to the Library thing, but she’s sharp and a little mean and knows exactly where she stands in the world, and Eliot can respect that. 

And she loves Quentin. That counts for a lot.

These things do not make talking to her any easier.

“So,” he prompts when it becomes clear that Alice isn’t going to start, or if she is it will take some time. Her jaw works.

“I didn’t want to bring it up in front of everyone else,” she says finally. Her shoulders hunch up even higher if possible and she forces them back down.

“Good thing we’ve stepped into your office,” returns Eliot, and her mouth twitches in the slightest edge of a smile. She ruins it with a sigh, a big unhappy huff. Eliot’s heels kick against the cabinets under the sink.

“I don’t think you’re going to like this.”

“Alice, I don’t think I’ve liked anything that’s happened in the past, oh, two years.”

_ Fair point _, says her expression. She presses her lips together. “Soul magic isn’t an exact science.”

“Mm, which is what you always want to hear about soul magic.”

She scowls at him. It doesn’t entirely mask the discomfort spreading across her face; he’s antsy just looking at her. She takes a deep breath. “Part of the criteria for a functioning animus binding is that you have to love the other person. A lot. A beyond-life-and-death love.” She huffs again and pushes forward a mile a minute. “Obviously the myth of a singular soulmate is a romanticized ideal and completely inaccurate to real life relationships but historically— I mean, there’s truth to any myth, I guess. If you’re a, you know. A magician.”

Eliot stares at her.

“Sorry, did you say _ soulmate_?”

“It’s not a completely accurate descriptor,” she says irritably.

“But it’s not inaccurate.”

She frowns at him for a long minute, and finally admits, “No.”

“Alice,” he says over the rushing in his ears. “That sounds like bullshit.”

“Why? Because you don’t love him?” She laughs a little, high and brittle. “I’m not blind, Eliot. Even if you weren’t, you know, _ together_. You’re not subtle.”

She kindly doesn’t mention the ill-timed threesome that ruined their relationship, but that doesn’t stop them both from thinking it. Old bitterness washes up.

“And that’s going to save Q’s life? My pathetic inability to keep my feelings to myself?”

“Maybe!” Alice snaps, too loud; it echoes off the tile. She drags the volume back down, hissing. “I don’t know! Maybe it’s another ridiculous Fillorian thing, or something the Monster did, or one of the gods out there decided to have some fun. Or maybe it’s _ true love _ and you just got lucky!”

He scoffs. “Fairy tales don’t happen in real life. True love doesn’t save the day.”

“They aren’t all happy endings,” she scowls viciously. “Haven’t you ever read a real fairy tale? They’re awful.”

He hasn’t, because his life is full of enough fucked up whimsy as it is and he doesn’t need to go looking for anything else, but. He gets the point. 

He backs down.

“Sorry,” he mutters. “I don’t like not knowing.”

Her shoulders sink. “Me neither,” she admits, which is about as close to _ I’m sorry _ as she’ll get. He cocks an eyebrow.

“True love, huh?”

“Shut up,” she mutters. Then, more solemnly, “You didn’t see him when you were gone.”

No. He didn’t. He’s perversely grateful for it.

She sighs, unwinding slightly, and leans against the counter next to him. He scoots over as best he can without falling into the sink.

“It’s not a bad thing,” she says more gently. “Loving Q.”

“I know.” It’s not a bad thing at all. It’s just— It doesn’t happen like this in real life. You can’t love someone back to life. You don’t get lucky like that.

“You know we got back together, before he—” She stops short. He can’t see her face for the curtain of her hair, but the hurt in her voice is clear enough.

“Oh.” He hadn’t.

“I thought— I thought maybe that it would be good, you know? He was so— He gave everything to getting you back and beating the Monster, and I missed him, and he needed someone to be there for him and I— I thought I could be that person. I wanted to be that person.”

“Are you—” he starts, and has to stop to reframe it. “Do you still think that?”

“I think I can’t be whatever he needed me to be.” She tucks her hair behind one ear and he catches sight of a familiar expression, smiling through heartbreak. “I do love him.”

“I know.” That’s something he’s never doubted, no matter how much of a mess they made of each other.

“I guess I just didn’t love him enough.”

It sits between them. She doesn’t sound bitter, exactly. Eliot thinks maybe she should sound bitter, that somehow _ he _ has loved Quentin enough to help and she hasn’t. It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. It isn’t supposed to work like that. You can’t fix someone by loving them. You just love them.

Or. Maybe that’s the difference.

Alice hunches her shoulders, tension singing through every line of her body. “I wanted him to be alright,” she says. “And he wasn’t, and I couldn’t do anything. I was right there, and I couldn’t do _ anything_.”

Eliot has the sense that she’s not talking about Quentin’s spiraling mental health anymore. She wipes a rough hand across her eyes.

“I shouldn’t have to be that," she says, bitter and sharp. "It’s not fair to either of us.”

She glances over at him, and away just as quickly. He sighs.

“I wasn’t there,” he says slowly. “I don’t know what it was like. But I think you’re probably right. It’s a lot to ask of someone, or to put on yourself, and dating doesn’t just— You can’t fix people like that.” He’s well aware that pulling someone else into your self destructive spiral doesn’t do anything to make it better. It just drags more people down with you.

She eyes him a long minute, long enough that he feels a little strange about it. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “You’re just… different.”

“I had a while to reflect on my shortcomings,” he says, and she laughs.

“I know what that’s like.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. He really does like her, despite everything. Maybe because of everything. They’ve collectively fucked each other over often enough that after a certain point you have to just agree to let it go. Statistically speaking anyone in this strange little group of theirs has probably gotten everyone else killed at least once, and after that it’s kind of a wash. His hand hovers above her shoulder, not quite touching, not sure if it would be welcome. He thinks probably not.

“For what it’s worth,” says Eliot, “He loved you too.”

She doesn’t say anything, but she takes his hand. They rest like that for a moment, just breathing. Just loving Q. It’s not a bad thing at all.

“There’s one other thing,” she says, and exhaustion hits Eliot like a wave. He sighs.

“Wonderful. Of course there is. What is it?”

“I think I know how to bring him back.”

He drops her hand. “You— what? Why didn’t you lead with that?”

She winces a little. “I wanted to be sure you were up for it.”

“_I _ was up for it? What does that mean?”

She pushes off the counter and turns to face him, blunt determination set through every inch of her. “You’re going to go get him.”

* * *

It’s pretty simple. He’s going to dream, and he’s going to— well, guide Quentin back to the land of the living.

“That sounds _ way _ oversimplified,” Eliot says.

“No, it’ll be fine. What could possibly go wrong?” asks Josh, which isn’t helpful in the slightest. At least four people groan.

“Really?” asks Margo. “I mean, _ really?_”

Josh shrugs.

“How will I know where to go?” Eliot asks Alice. “Maybe I wasn’t clear about this before: it’s an endless pitch dark void in all directions.” He can think of a dozen ways this can go wrong, and that’s just off the top of his head.

“We’ll protect the connection between your soul and your body,” Julia promises. “You’ll have a tether back here. You’ll just have to follow it and, y’know, bring Q with you.”

He’s going to pass out. His voice climbs half an octave. “Oh, great, I’m sure it will be fine then.”

Margo squeezes his shoulder, almost bruising. He sinks into her touch.

They’ve cleared the living room for this, stripped it down to floorboard and blank walls. It’s a group effort to put it together, based on some esoteric ritual Kady and Julia tracked down. Sprawling, intricate runes curl across the ground, and Eliot is similarly covered in black paint, carefully applied by Margo in a way that almost viscerally reminds him of the Trials, down to the suffocating fear of fucking this up and losing one of the best things in his life.

There’s one more component to the set up, the part Alice and Josh spent a week painstakingly building cell by cell. The body of Quentin Coldwater lies where it’s been positioned for the ritual, painted in white paint and utterly still. Eliot can’t seem to take his eyes off it.

“All you have to do is walk,” Julia tells him. “We’ll handle the rest. Just— bring him home.”

His heart clatters against his ribcage, and the ache just behind it won’t let up, a constant zinging shock that makes it difficult to breathe. Margo helps him down, careful not to smear the chalk on the floor or the paint on his skin. He smooths his hands over his knees, watching the fabric of his pants bunch.

“When did our lives get this fucked up?”

“About the same time you became king of a world from a kid’s book,” Margo tells him, and kisses his cheek. “You’ve got this.”

He takes a deep breath. Whatever it takes. “I’m bringing him back.” If he says it he almost believes it.

“I know.”

Nearby, Josh holds a glass full of something vibrantly purple. “It’ll help with the transition,” he promises. “And, uh, keep you there until you like. Come back.”

“Sleep of the dead?” Eliot hazards dryly, taking the glass. No one laughs. Fair enough.

Alice clears her throat, “Whatever happens, all we can do is keep an eye on things from out here, so—”

“I know, I know. I’m on my own. Don’t fuck it up.”

Julia smiles thinly. “Good luck.”

Everyone take up distinct positions around the edge of the circle, fingers flexing as they prepare to cast. No big deal, Eliot tells himself. Just a little walk. Just walking Quentin’s soul back to the land of the living. What could possibly go wrong?

“Well,” he says. He should say something clever here. If there was a time for famous last words this is definitely it. He toasts the rest of the group. “Fuck it.” 

It tastes faintly of lavender.

He’s unconscious before he even sets the glass down.

* * *

Once, when Eliot was young, his brothers locked him in the cellar. A prank, ostensibly, though none of them had owned up to it so his lovely and reasonable father had pinned the blame on Eliot. Poking around where he wasn’t meant to go, he’d been, and this was what happened to little boys who did what they shouldn’t. As if Eliot had been the one to lock the door behind him. The unfairness had stung, and then been lost in the flood of misery and hate that followed him around for eighteen fucking years.

It had been cold, a seeping chill that started with a shiver and dug its way into your bones until you were sure you could never be warm again. There’d been water on the ground, a leak from some pipe, and it was dark, pressing dark, the sort of dark that spun up illusions of light and color before your eyes. The only thing he’d been able to see was the narrow crack under the door, less light and more an absence of darkness.

He’d shouted for hours, demanding they let him out, and when that failed he sat there and shivered until his father finally grew irritated enough by his absence to go fishing for him down under the house. Bastard.

Limbo, it turns out, is uncommonly similar to the cellar of his childhood home.

Awareness filters in slowly, like waking from a deep sleep. Water drips, a directionless _ plink plink plink _ off in the distance. His feet are cold, shoes soaked through. Nothing presses in from all directions, dizzying. He grits his teeth.

Quentin, he reminds himself. He has to keep it together for Q.

“Right,” he says to himself, and he’s prepared to hear Quentin’s voice but instead he hears his own. He frowns down at himself and finds— himself, dressed in a paisley shirt he hasn’t worn in months and a smart plum-colored vest, and he can only see all this because his chest is glowing, physically glowing, like someone’s lit up a lantern in there and now it shines through, reddish and muted but alight nevertheless. It pulse steadily, the rhythm of his heartbeat. If he concentrates, he can feel a steady tug back behind him, like something’s threaded through his ribs and trying to reel him in.

“Okay,” he says slowly, and turns in a slow circle. The direction of the tug shifts with it, compass pointing north. Good to know that’s working.

Then he clenches his jaw and puts it out of his mind. He can’t go back without Q.

“Quentin?” he calls, and there’s a secondary twinge in his chest. Not the usual low ache; it’s sharper, concentrated, like there’s something physically tucked up next to his heart. All this has to be terrible for his health, he thinks idly.

“Q?” he calls again, and waits, straining for the faintest response. There’s nothing but the steady drip of water.

Fuck.

Okay. Think, Waugh. He closes his eyes.

Somewhere, Quentin is lost and alone, trapped in between worlds like dust behind glass, like a fly in amber. Somehow, Eliot has to find him.

He stands still in the darkness and feels for the twinge in his chest, the one that feels like Quentin, the thing that is, maybe, sort of, Quentin’s soul. He ignores he pull behind him, the one insisting he follow it back, and reaches instead for Q.

For a moment he’s two people at once, himself standing in the hazy glow of his heartbeat and Quentin standing in the cold, wet and alone and still, unmoving. The connection is filament thin, delicate, but it’s there.

He turns away from the world of the living and walks into the dark.

And walks.

And _ walks_.

He can’t say how long he travels. There’s no way to measure time, nor distance. Nothing changes around him; his only company is the rhythmic flare of his heartbeat trying to turn him back to the land of the living and the steady splash of the his footsteps. Emptiness crowds around him, and in the endless spread of darkness he feels like he might float away, fall up into nothing.

And then, between one heartbeat and the next, he’s there.

Eliot stops short, almost stumbling as a figure appears at the edge of the muted glow of his lifeline. Quentin is wan and still in the unlight, expression blank.

“Eliot,” he says without any inflection at all. “This is strange.”

Eliot can barely keep upright.

“Quentin,” he breathes around the sudden flare in his chest. Quentin stares at him. “Q.”

“Why are you here?”

“I came to get you.”

Quentin blinks. “Why?”

His heart skips a beat in the clutter of his chest. “What?”

“I’m dreaming again,” Quentin decides, turning away. Panic spikes through Eliot, shivery and choking, and he reaches out and—

“No, Q, wait—”

—grabs him by the shoulder.

The contact blazes through every inch of him like a sunburst. His hand spasms, tightening on instinct, and Quentin cries out. 

It’s the two-part mirage of his dream magnified a hundredfold; he can’t tell where Quentin ends and he begins. He sways under the sensation of fingers digging into his shoulder, and Quentin’s sweater is soft against his palm, and he is two sets of aching souls and the binding between them.

And oh, Quentin is _ empty_; he's drowning the sucking void of nothing. Too long cocooned in the dark, there’s nothing there. Now, though, now there's Eliot, hope and hurt and fear and faith funnelling into the hollow space of him, and Quentin flinches back against it. Eliot can feel it burning through him as surely as it cuts through Quentin.

He tries to pull back, but his fingers won’t let go. He’s not the one holding on.

Quentin is staring at him, and then suddenly he’s staring at himself.

“Eliot?” says Quentin in his mouth, and Eliot experiences a wash of vertigo strong enough that his knees buckle, and without meaning to they’re both kneeling in the water, soaking the knees of his pants, and he is holding Quentin up or Quentin is holding him, he can’t tell. They’re tangled up, Eliot and Quentin and Eliot-and-Quentin.

“Q,” he gasps. There are tears in his eyes; he watches them fall down Quentin’s cheeks, watches Q flinch against a fresh rush of emotion, ashen and cold and half dead and burning up with a hundred thousand things Eliot can’t stop feeling.

“El, what—?” he says, and then, with another sharp cry, “It _ hurts. _”

Eliot knows. Eliot knows because he feels each and every little thing that cuts through Quentin. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry, I came to get you, I don’t know how to stop it.” He shudders, or Quentin is shuddering, or— The whole of them shudders, one long, rolling sensation of release so deep it’s almost anguish. For a long minute they stay there, kneeling. Eliot presses his forehead against Quentin’s and wraps a hand around the back of his neck, and Quentin goes loose; he feels the relief in his bones. The flicker of his heartbeat pulses between them. Eliot strives for calm, for Quentin’s sake. It’s nearly impossible. He tries anyway.

“Sorry,” he murmurs again, steadier. Remember to fit his soul inside his own body, mostly, not spill into Quentin quite so much. “Are you alright?”

“No,” Quentin says, and he laughs a little, brittle and cracking. He sits back on his heels, hands open on his thighs. Eliot drinks in the sight of him, red-faced and messy and beautiful, the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. Tears glint on his cheeks and Eliot’s are damp to match.

“You came to get me,” he says, hushed. Eliot’s heart sings.

“It’s my big romantic gesture,” he says. Quentin’s wonder gleams through him; he struggles to speak around it. “Is it working?”

“It’s a start,” says Quentin, and he flinches back at whatever hot-bright thing has just burst to life inside him. Eliot climbs slowly to his feet and reaches down to help Quentin up. The contact sparks through him again; for a dizzy moment he’s the one being pulled upright, staring up at his face.

“That’s going to take some getting used to,” he says with Quentin’s mouth, and then he’s himself again. Q squeezes Eliot’s hand briefly. A wave of something that tastes vaguely of amusement brushes against him.

“El,” says Quentin. “Eliot.”

“Hi,” says Eliot, breathless. “It’s really fucking good to see you.”

“I know,” says Quentin, who can feel the relief sluicing through him. He hesitates, confusion and hope blistering under Eliot’s skin. “Now what?”

“Trust me?”

Quentin looks at him. “Yeah,” he says. “Of course.”

Eliot squeezes his hand and reaches for the tug behind him. Quentin makes a little shocked sound next to him as it filters back to him, the inexorable draw of the living world.

His hand tightens around Eliot. They follow the call.

It’s slow going. The tether in his chest burns hot, heartbeat flare growing bright as they go, but something pulls at Quentin too, his ashen face going greyer. Eliot feels the strain like leaden weights at his heels, the hungry void loathe to let them go. He holds Quentin tighter. He’s not letting go. He’ll carry him, if he has to.

But Quentin presses forward, his determination unwavering. Eliot feels that too.

The first indication of change comes as a blip on the horizon, directly in front of them. It grows slowly, impossibly slowly, resolves itself into a freestanding door frame, stark white. After the monotony of the dark, it leaves an afterimage against his eyelids when he blinks. The thing in his chest reaches for it, through it.

Quentin balks.

“Is that it?”

“I think so.”

He can feel Quentin’s fear like his own, catches the flashbulb memory of a door and stepping through into nothing. He swallows.

“I won’t let go,” he says with Quentin’s mouth. “I’m right here.”

“I know,” says Quentin in Eliot’s voice.

He takes the first step, and they step into shining light.

* * *

He jolts back to himself feeling like he’s been kicked in the chest, Margo leaning over him, and he very nearly cracks his skull against hers when he jerks up. He flops back down immediately and lies there a moment, groaning, blinking up at Margo’s drawn face. There are tears at the corner of her eyes.

“What’s that for?” he asks hoarsely, and Margo bites out a tiny sob.

“You _ asshole _,” she says. “You weren’t breathing.”

“What?” He sucks in a breath of air that tastes like metallic air conditioning and the ozone tang of heavy magic. “I’m fine, I— How is Q?”

Margo’s face drawn tighter, and Eliot pushes himself up through the whole-body ache of projecting one’s soul to a different plane of existence to see Kady knelt over the still body of Quentin Coldwater, pumping her hands against his chest. Margo shakes her head, hair shimmering.

“He was here a moment but—”

Eliot loses the rest of the answer; the tangled ball behind his heart flares to life and he catches the scattershot impression of _ helpstuckreaching_.

“Fuck,” he says, scrambling forward on his hands and knees to the other side of Quentin’s still form. “Fuck, Q—”

_ Littlehelpplease _ goes the thing in his chest, brimming with muted panic, dragging him forward. Kady half looks at him, hands still pumping at Quentin’s chest, with a startled, “Hey, what are you—”

“Move,” he orders sharply, leaning over the body. Quentin’s soul, caught in his chest, strains. _ Please_, he thinks, lost in the kaleidoscope of Q’s emotions; his chest is entirely on fire. _ Please let this work. _

He sets his hand on Quentin’s chest, just above his heart.

For a moment, nothing happens.

Then the fire inside him surges forwards, yanks him down with it, and lets out a sharp cry, hand braced against Quentin’s unmoving body. He is being stretched from the inside out, something dragged from him filament by filament, and he can’t let it go; it’s got his hooks in him and it’s tearing him apart, a hundred times worse than an axe to the abdomen. Quentin’s life, sheltered in his chest for so long, finally begins to break free, a messy amputation of something that’s grown into him. He can’t pull it all apart.

Nearby someone is saying his name, and there’s a hand on his shoulder, and he can’t think of anything except the still chest under his palm and the burning thing tearing its way out of him.

_ Please _ , he thinks, or maybe he’s saying it, he can’t tell, _ Please, Q__— _

“Eliot,” someone is saying. Margo. “El, you have to let go, you have to—”

No, he can’t, he has to— Quentin is still in here, still _ stuck, _he has to—

He splays his fingers across Quentin’s chest, free hand brushing hair out of Quentin’s face, carefully cupping his cheek, slack and empty.

“Q,” he grits out around the thing tearing out of him. “Q, it’s okay. Take it. It’s okay.” He’s been holding the spark of Quentin’s life force, his _ soul _, tucked up against his heart for weeks and weeks, nearly months. He doesn’t mind giving a little bit back. His life is as good as Q’s anyway. He’d give it willingly. Hand, love, life, whatever Quentin needs. Whatever it takes.

He takes a breath and leans down and kisses him, light and lingering and gentle as a sigh.

He’s being turned inside out as he pulls back; he grits his teeth against it, lets it all wash through him, thinks _ for Q, for Q, for Q_, and just as it is too much, just when he _ must _ open his mouth to scream, it—

Stops.

And under his hands, Quentin takes a wet, rasping breath and starts coughing.

Eliot sags, bowing over himself. He already feels the magical hangover coming on, a head- and stomach- and body-ache and permeates every inch of him. He wants to lie down and sleep for a week. He wheezes a little with each breath. He’s pretty sure he’s broken a rib somewhere in there.

But Quentin is alive, and opening his eyes, and—

“Holy shit,” he gasps, sitting up, head twisting around to stare at everyone, who in turn gape down at him. His hair is long in this body; it swings around his chin. He looks at them, at himself, around the room with the chalk and the incense burning, eyes wide. “Holy shit. What’s going on? Am I— Am I naked?” He frowns. “Was someone kissing me?”

Eliot sits back on his heels and laughs until he cries.

* * *

Lipson comes by again. Eliot doesn’t complain as she pokes and prods at him, and then fixes his broken ribs from Margo’s CPR and his own attempt to physically give Quentin his life. The magical exhaustion will heal with time.

“And the soul magic shit?” Eliot asks, propped up in bed and feeling more like one large bruise than he had coming back from the Monster.

Lipson frowns. “I haven’t the faintest idea. I’m sure it’s fine. It hasn’t killed you yet.”

Which is exactly the sort of rock-solid certainty Eliot always looks for in his medical professionals. Lipson shrugs an apology. Well, it’s outside her wheelhouse too, he supposes.

“Thanks for trying,” Eliot sighs, because he can be magnanimous and kingly and all that, and she tells him to let her know if anything changes and makes herself scare.

Eliot goes to find Quentin.

He’s in his room, where Eliot has never been because by the time he was there to be in it he couldn’t face it. It’s pathetically bare, untouched except for the tangled blankets on the bed and Quentin sitting cross-legged in the middle with a laptop open in front of him. He looks up when Eliot pushes the door open.

“Hi,” Eliot says. “Can I come in?”

“Um. Yeah, sure.”

Quentin closes the laptop and scoots aside so Eliot can join him. Eliot takes a moment to drink him in, tired and frowning and gloriously alive.

“How are you?”

Quentin sighs. “Honestly? I’m not sure.”

“That’s fair.” He bumps his knee against Q.

For a fraction of a second, a warmth that isn’t his flashes through him. Quentin stares at him.

“Did you just—?” Eliot says, and Quentin nods. “Is that still a thing?”

Eliot reaches a hand out, palm up. Quentin delicately lays his atop it and a muted ripple of confusion bleeds into amazement. Eliot retracts his hand, flexing his fingers.

“Well,” he says. “That’s new.”

Quentin’s lips twitch into a wry smile. “Soul magic, huh?”

“According to Alice.”

“Well,” Quentin shrugs. “She’s pretty smart.”

“She is.”

Q hesitates. “I owe her an apology.”

“I’m not sure it’s any of my business. But probably, yeah.”

Q sighs and tips himself backwards to lie on the bed. Eliot eases down to join him.

“I forgot,” Q says to the ceiling, while Eliot watches him. They’re not touching any more, but he doesn’t need that to see the quiet curl of exhaustion across Quentin’s face. “How to feel. Not just there, before that too. All I had was you, trying to get you back, trying to keep you safe, and once you were, I wasn’t— I mean. There was nothing else left.”

Sharp guilt shivers through him, that he started this, that he played any part at all in this. That his attempt to keep Q safe got him hurt. “Do you still feel like that?”

Quentin doesn’t say anything, but he holds his hand out, watching Eliot steadily. 

After a moment, Eliot takes it.

It’s not like last time, the drowning wave, riot of color shattering a grey world. There’s no violence to it now; only sure and steady flashes of feeling, slivers of sensation that don’t belong to him. The press of the bed against his back, the gnawing edge of hunger, a twinkling starlight constellation of tired-stiff-achy. And beneath it all strands gratitude and hope and belief woven together into something big and blinding-bright, buoying him.

“Oh,” says Eliot a little stupidly.

Quentin rolls closer into Eliot’s side, and Eliot doesn’t say or do anything, just keeps still, perfectly still, tries not to drown Quentin in awe and wonder. 

Q says, “I think I probably owe a lot of people apologies.”

Eliot thinks a lot of them probably owe Q an apology too, an endless echo of _ I’m sorry _passed down the chain_. _ Eliot’s got one himself.

Welp. May as well get on with it.

He sighs, sitting up a little. Quentin frowns, concern skittering between their fingers, but Eliot squeezes his hand in assurance that he doesn’t need to move, that he doesn’t need to do anything. Quentin’s skin is soft against his, newly made.

“If you need time, that’s okay,” he says. Quentin frowns up at him and pushes himself up to meet him. He doesn’t pull his hand away, so he must feel the churning anxiety in Eliot’s gut. “But I— need to tell you something.”

“Okay,” he agrees.

“What I said, after the mosaic,” he starts, and Quentin’s expression flickers, but he doesn’t pull away. Eliot holds on to that. “I was afraid. And I was wrong. I’ve had... a lot of time to think." There's a flare of bitter irony from Quentin; Eliot holds on tighter. "I owe you an apology, for not listening, for not trusting you. Q, I’m sorry. I love you. If you still want, I— I'd like to try us. Together. Because I’ve tried living a life without you and it’s just— It fucking sucks, Q. I never want to do that again.”

Q’s lip quirks. “Is this part of the romantic gesture?”

Eliot matches his expression. “It’s a start.”

Quentin hums a little in the back of his throat and takes Eliot’s hand in both of his. His fingers run across his knuckles, his fingers, the new scars that belong to the Monster more than him. One more thing he’s learning to live with. Whatever he’s feeling is a cloudy mess of things Eliot is afraid to pick apart.

“Julia told me how it worked, you know. Best they figured it out.”

Eliot wets his lips, staring more at Quentin’s hands than his face. “She did?”

“Mmm.” There’s a quirk of humor somewhere in there. “Something about an ancient magic bonds of true love.”

“Fairytales aren’t real, Q,” he says softly. Quentin smiles at him, small and gentle and fond.

“We live in a world full of magic, El. We’ve been kings of a magical world. There’s got to be some good stuff in there along with all the shit.”

Eliot will never tire of Quentin’s shining belief. He doesn’t think he could.

“But, um. Sorry about the, y’know. Semi-possession.”

“If it means you’re not dead, I truly do not give a shit,” Eliot says. “But thanks.”

The knot of feelings in Quentin’s chest loosens a little, blooms into a bouquet of amusement and joy and faint exasperation and love, definitely love. Eliot’s sure of it because the same feeling is expanding inside him. He swallows.

“So, is that a yes?”

“Mmm. Yeah.” 

It feels like fireworks, like he’s all alight with it, giddy. Quentin grins in response.

“How long do you think this is going to last?” he asks, bringing their clasped hands up to eye level.

“I don’t know,” says Eliot, and for a moment he’s shivery with panic at the thought that Quentin can feel everything he’s feeling. But it’s electric too, marvelous. Something good among the mess of their lives; proof that sometimes, maybe, if you are very very lucky, love is enough. He lets it all roll around inside him, basking in the joy of being loved by Quentin Coldwater. After a moment, he adds, “You know, the sex is probably incredible.”

“We could find out,” Q suggests with an impish little grin, and he’s still laughing when Eliot drags him in to kiss him, every bright-good feeling in his chest mirrored a hundredfold between them, filling the world with color.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr](http://impossibletruths.tumblr.com)


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